Happy Spring from Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine People’s Garden!
Cincinnati, Ohio— We made it through the Ohio frost date and are planting our seedlings furiously!  We are headed towards the beginning of summer and I feel like I can already tase the tomatoes and peppers. Outside of planting, weeding, watering and top dressing our garden beds with compost, we have also offered several classes to the youth who visit the garden a few times a month. Check out what we learned together!
Singing in the rain.. well how about weeding in the rain? The precipitation didn’t keep garden club from coming over to help out in the garden last week. This large garden area has already been planted with a row of tomatoes but the remaining section was covered with weeds and left over tulips from early spring. So we grabbed our gloves and a few stirrup hoes and got to work. Many hands make light work and lots of happy smiles. By next month we will have this planted with more delicious summer food.
Although many of the flowers I grow in the community garden are used in bouquets, or left for our pollinators to enjoy, we also grow many edible varieties of flowers. So to sweeten up our garden club meet up we took a tour of the garden and harvested anything edible that caught our eye. Since I am a farmer-florist who loves to share the many ways one can earn money from the flowers we grow in the garden, I thought it would be appropriate to highlight cake decorating. It is wedding season ya know. 🙂 So we used these mini vanilla cupcakes as our palette and enjoyed adding camomile, mint, fennel, cornflowers and more to the tops of our desserts. It was a beautiful lesson!
The cool weather vegetable plants our talented community gardener Jill started from seed earlier this winter are now providing food for us and are really wonderful to look at as well. Jill was so successful with starting spring seedlings that she also started many summer plants too. She dispersed them to gardeners and we look forward to planting some more with garden club soon.
Mother’s Day was celebrated this month and we were happy to help our garden club members create beautiful arrangements. They harvested mint, sage, anemones, and cornflowers, and created gorgeous arrangements to celebrate the important women in their lives. It was a pleasure to help them design and execute their ideas. Happy Mother’s Day!
Looking forward to sharing with you what we are up to next month. Garden onward!!
Peace, love, happiness & flowers,
Christina
Garden Coordinator  for Over-the-Rhine People’s Garden